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Image of a bonded wafer containing an array of µVS devices at the University of South Australia's Future Industries Institute. Credit: South Australia Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.

Image of a bonded wafer containing an array of µVS devices at the University of South Australia's Future Industries Institute. Credit: South Australia Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Indee Labs received US$2.6M in venture financing extending its
seed-stage funding to more than US$5.4M (AU$7.1M). This will accelerate
the development of Indee Labs’ gene therapy manufacturing technology
into a product that biotechnology companies can use for discovery-stage
research.

The round was led by Founders Fund (San Francisco) and included Main
Sequence Ventures (Australia) along with several angels. Previously, the
company closed a US$1.3M angel round from Y Combinator, Jude Gomila,
Shaun Maguire and Jaffray Woodriff (Felton Group, LLC). Indee Labs total
funds raised to date include US$3.9M in equity and US$1.5M in
non-dilutive funding.

FF Science and Main Sequence are both deep technology funds that bring
forward world-changing, science-based technologies.

“All of the industry excitement around discovering gene targets for
cell therapy has overlooked an inconvenient fact. We do not yet have
scalable and efficient means of manufacturing these life-saving cells.
The team at Indee Labs has developed a gene delivery technique that is
not only inexpensive enough for general use, but fast enough to use the
patient’s own cells. We expect Indee Labs will become the standard
platform for bedside cell therapy,” stated Aaron VanDevender, Chief
Scientist and Principal at Founders Fund.

“We are excited to partner with the team at Indee Labs to help drive
down the cost of developing and manufacturing immunotherapies for the
treatment of cancer. Indee Labs’ new gene delivery technology provides a
faster and more efficient method for developing and manufacturing
personalised therapies at scale. We believe this may make these
lifesaving treatments available to far more patients than at present,”
explained Partner at Main Sequence Ventures, Mike Nicholls.

This follows the recent US$695K (AU$892K) non-dilutive grant from
Australia’s BioMedTech Horizons (BMTH) program. It was awarded by
MTPConnect and an independent selection panel assessed that Indee Labs’
technology addresses a “global megatrend” in healthcare. Link

Proceeds from the BMTH grant will go towards Indee Labs’ Australian
operations and chip development at the Australian National Fabrication
Facility (ANFF) at University of South Australia’s (UniSA) Future
Industries Institute (FII).

“Australia has many unique and comprehensive micro- and nano-fabrication
capabilities that allows us to operate as a fabless startup. We are
excited to extend our partnership with the ANFF and FII as we move
towards commercial-grade chip manufacturing,” said Warren McKenzie, CEO
of Indee Labs Australia

“Partnerships such as this with Indee Labs are a great example of how
our world-class facilities and staff at UniSA are having global impact,
core to the FII’s mission to create the industries of the future,” said
Director of UniSA’s FII, Professor Emily Hilder.

Proceeds from the round will go towards building Indee Labs’ team, a
user-friendly instrument and head-to-head studies against incumbent
technologies. These studies will allow the company to most accurately
demonstrate performance improvements, such as lowering lead times for
patients.

Ryan Pawell, CEO of Indee Labs, said, “Patients can die in the time
that it takes to manufacture these immunotherapies -- four months
according to the JULIET clinical trial with a target of about 3 weeks
for Liso-cel. We are aiming for a couple weeks then maybe a few days.
This is a realistic goal because our core technology can be engineered
into a closed system and does not perturb immune cells.”

“Thus far, it appears that Indee Labs’ technology can rapidly process
clinically- and commercially-relevant samples with no observed immune
cell perturbation, likely due to the gentle nature of fluid dynamics
coupled with rapid processing times. This has been supported by
transcriptome-wide sequencing data, which showed negligible differential
gene expression in over 200,000 unique transcript reads, along with
additional studies that revealed no variation in cytokine production or
activation phenotype for processed cells relative to the handling
controls,” explained Chief Scientific Officer, Amy Twite PhD.

The latest financing follows new results generated by the team
demonstrating functional modification of human primary immune cells with
different constructs.

The team has already demonstrated revolutionary improvements over
existing gene delivery methods including higher yield, negligible immune
cell perturbation along with rapid processing of research-, clinical-
and commercial-scale samples with a simple workflow and a small
footprint. It will also reduce the lead times for a treatment from
months to weeks or even days. These promising early results have led to
seed investment from investors in both Australia (Main Sequence
Ventures) and the United States (Y Combinator, Social+Capital and
Founders Fund).

Indee Labs would like to hear from biotechnology and pharmaceutical
companies developing gene therapies interested in trialing gene delivery
based on µVS.

About Main Sequence Ventures

Main Sequence Ventures backs deep tech founders inventing tomorrow.
Established to manage the CSIRO Innovation Fund (CSIRO Innovation Fund
I, LP), we are company builders and value creators with a mission to
transform inspiring Australian research into epic global companies.

FF Science is an early stage investment vehicle of Founders Fund, a
venture capital firm investing in science and technology companies
solving difficult problems. The firm and its partners have been early
backers of some of the most impactful companies of the past decade,
including SpaceX, Palantir, Facebook and Airbnb. Founders Fund pursues a
founder-friendly investment strategy, providing maximum support with
minimum interference.